This is one of those uncomfortable situations where you find yourself on the same side as the devil.
The Rdb database for OpenVMS is still getting updates, and a new port to the VMS-x86 release that has recently emerged.
https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.htm...
Oracle just pulled the plug.
Linux enabled commodity hardware to eat Big Iron's lunch using that same x86. Dell and IBM certainly made a good business filling datacenter racks with their x86 offerings for quite some time.
There’s also that Oracle linux was formed from RHEL.
Maybe let’s not confuse Oracle undermining their competitor’s moat with their genuinely being on the side of the community.
It’s been a while, but the necessity of MariaDB and Percona also seem to show that Oracle’s been very much on the other side of this kind of move in the past.
I'd love for Red Hat to call Oracle's bluff, but it would never happen.
Oracle's definitely been on the wrong side of these arguments for long enough that I wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (Oracle) is better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons (IBM).
However there is also another idea that I think is valid, which is "reward the behavior you want to see". Whyever they did it, if it's good, you let them know that you want that and you don't burn them the one time they do something you always say you want.
I still don't thank them though. There is no reasonable hope of ever influencing Oracle to become something 100% the opposite of what they are at their very core. So F them. I see no point in worrying about failing to reward the behavior you want to see in this case. You will never get the behavior you really want out of Oracle, and so all you would be doing is letting them influence you, not you influencing them.
Yes, I agree with this as well. It's all complicated.
Oracle only cares about one thing: profits. So any meaningful way of rewarding their behavior would have to come in the form of giving them more money. Every dollar you spend is, after all, a vote telling the entity you gave the dollar to to keep on doing whatever it is they're doing.
This one fairly self-serving press release isn't enough for me to give Oracle any money, though. I don't think they'd take the right lesson from it. Especially because I'm not the sort of big spender that Oracle really cares about.